Readings for the Holy Week

To distract me from the goriness of this Holy Week and since I am yet to make up my mind on where to go this long work-free week, I stocked on my readings. This will keep me entertained during the next seven days of doing nothing as I do not think it proper to spend it chasing after bacchanalian pursuits, this, after all, is a holy week that is best observed by doing reflections, prayers, fasting, and stuff of less mundane nature.

They’d also be good company in case I decide to hop on a bus going north to I do not know exactly where.

The company stood at attention, each man looking straight before him at the empty parade ground, where the cinder piles showed purple with evening. On the wind smelt of barracks and disinfectant there was a faint of greasiness of food cooking. At the other side of the wide field long lines of men shuffled slowly into the narrow shanty that was the mess hall. Chins down, chests out, legs twitching and tired from the afternoon drilling, the company stood at attention.

John Don Passos, Three Soldiers, p7

Waterford, which is Irish for water you have to ford across as opposed to water you have to live in, die in, clamber over stone walls in, chase cattle in and go to bars in, is as you would expect a big splash of a country. A dirty, muddy splash. Which I suppose is not surprising as it is situated on the banks of a river called Suir.

Peter Bidlecombe, Ireland–In a Glass of its Own, p7

So God, the story goes, made the earth. There was nothing much to it, at first, the firmament steaming gray, maybe a smear of slime upon its featureless face. A blank canvas. God looked it over, decided it would do, and went ahead with the detail work.

J. Robert Lennon, Mailman, p17

Two officers sat side by side in a cramped command couches of the RSFS Fergus as the light cruiser accelerated away from the Galway system.

L.E. Modesitt, Jr, The Ethos Effect, p3.

Long ago my father and I were servants at Cripplegate, a cotton plantation in South Carolina. That distant place, the world of my childhood, is ruin now, mere parable, but what history I have begins in an unrecorded accident before the Civil War, late one evening when my father, George Hawkins, still worked in the big house, watched over his owbner’s interests, and often drank with his Master–this was John Polkinghorne–on the front porch aster a heavy meal.

Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, p3

The morning before Easter Sunday, Jane Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon bus arrived that would take her home. She was a long legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved.

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, p1

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain that started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twnety miles of thick, impenetrable scrub oak and pine at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.

James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain, p1

Some wars begin badly. some end badly. The Iraq War of 2003 was exceptional in both beginning well for the Anglo-American force that waged it and ending it victoriously. The credit properly belonged in both cases to the American part of the coalition.

Geocounter

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